DOCBOOK: Different types of paragraphs?

Hello all. I'm new to DocBook, so forgive me if some of my
assumptions are incorrect. After reading through a lot of the book
and trying out a few documents, there are a few things that are a
little unclear to me.

How does one differentiate between different types of paragraphs,
aside from the available tags (<para>, <blockquote>, etc.). I need
to, for instance, differentiate between normal paragraphs in the
book and the first paragraph in each chapter, or the first paragraph
in each section. In HTML I can just use a CLASS, such as
<p class="InitialPara"> and the style sheet for that class would,
for instance, not indent the first line. I notice that there is no
CLASS attribure in DocBook. Is there some other way to do this? Can
I use the ROLE attribure the same way?

Thanks a lot.
-- Dan
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                                 Daniel G. Delaney
 www.Dionysia.org/~dionysos/
 PGP Public Key: /~dionysos/pgp.html
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